std.fileformats?

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Tuesday, January 7, 2020 7:20:05 PM MST Walter Bright via Digitalmars-d 
wrote:
> I'd be good with thinking about moving std.xml to dub. But not to unDead,
> as there is no replacement.

Why? I thought that the whole point of undead was for stuff from Phobos that
we wanted to get rid of but still wanted to be available for older code
would go to undead. I don't see how whether there is a replacement in Phobos
is relevant. e.g. std.stream and friends were put into undead, and we don't
really have a replacement for those. You can solve the problems that those
modules try to solve in a different way using what's in Phobos, but we don't
really have a stream solution in Phobos right now. What would be better
about putting std.xml in its own project instead of undead?

And honestly, from what I've seen of std.xml, I think that anyone using it
should just plain seriously reconsider. I don't know how buggy it actually
is, but it clearly was doing some stuff wrong such that it wouldn't be able
to properly handle at least some XML files (though at the moment, I don't
recall exactly what I found in there).

And we do have multiple xml solutions available on code.dlang.org now. So,
while we may not have a "blessed," default solution for people to switch to,
there are better options available than std.xml.

Also, I think that putting std.xml in its own project makes it too likely
that someone else would use it in a new project, whereas if it's in undead,
it's unlikely to be used by new projects, just older projects that were
already using it. We've considered std.xml to be a poor solution for years
now (we've even had a warning in its documentation that it was going to go
away because it isn't up to our current standards), and I don't think that
we should be encouraging its use. Putting it in undead makes it available
without presenting it as a solution that people should be using. It's also
where we've already been putting all of the modules that we decided to get
rid of from Phobos, and we haven't really used the criteria of needing a
replacement previously as far as whether it goes in undead or elsewhere.
That's just been part of the question of whether we would remove it, and in
some cases, we have removed stuff without really having a replacement in
Phobos (most notably std.stream and friends).

- Jonathan M Davis